Jumpstart iOS automation using Appium – Part 1

In these series of articles I plan to simplify automating iOS using Appium. Anyone who has knowledge of programming and interested in automation may benefit reading this article.

To get yourself started let’s understand in short what is an Appium. Appium is an open source test automation tool for mobile applications which allows you to test all 3 types of mobile devices – Native , Hybrid , Mobile Web.

Here are a few prerequisites you may have to install in your system(Macbook or Mac Mini) ,in-order to work with Appium.

Anyone with some experience in the mobile testing space will know about Appium or would have certainly heard about it. Appium allows mobile QA engineers or developers alike to automate UI for Native or Hybrid applications or a mobile website on a browser.

While Appium lets us run the automation on a real device, it can also automate scenarios on an emulator (an application that emulates real mobile device software, hardware and OS, allowing us to test and debug our application ), in our case a Xcode based iOS emulator.

The other key benefit of using Appium is that you can design a single framework that can run automation on both iOS and Android since Appium supports both. This significantly helps the developer and the organization in cost reduction, low maintenance and in certain scenarios it allows us to follow consistency.

Since Appium has client support for multiple programming languages it is easier to write your automation test cases in a language of your choice.